Bay Area Inbound Marketing Blog

Created the Video Above for Imanami to Shorten Sales Cycles by Identifying the Customer Pain Points their Software Solves

I hear the same thing every day, Sales are down and you don’t know why.

Sales is pointing fingers and Marketing and Marketing is pointing fingers at Sales. What is really happening is people today are using the internet to find products and services to solve their problems, and if your company isn't executing well in your internet marketing, your competitors often are, so your market share is simply shrinking. 

Don't believe me? Ask yourself this. Why wouldn't customers look for solutions via the internet? It's faster and cheaper than flying across the country to a trade show or driving around town. Don't you block unwanted messages with spam filters and callerid? So how do you get found by prospects, get leads, and get sales?

Companies who refuse to move to effective internet-marketing methods are stuck in NO SALES Land. 

Do You Have Any of These Internet Marketing Problems?

• I see companies spending tens of thousands on video ads that are creative but don't drive leads or business or even explain the pain points the company's products can solve for the customer. I created the video embedded in this blog article to shorten sales cycles by outlining exactly what pain points Imanami's four software products solve for their customers.
• I have had clients tell me they are hiring an "SEO expert" at $300,000 a year and yet their site rankings on Alexa and SEOMoz are below my website's rankings and I'm a 5-man consulting firm in business just 5 years with no SEO consultant. I just use Hubspot SEO tools such as blogging template and page-grader tool to get good results.
• I often have to create a "blogging template" for clients incorporating the 6 most important parameters that google uses for page ranking such as "tags for keywords", "alt-text for images", and "Headers" in order to enable their websites "get found" in an organic search. Or I run an SEO program for Wordpress to build up their juice.
• Companies often tell me if their sales aren't good going to 6 trade shows a year, then they will go to 60 trade shows a year and that still isn't working. But now they are burning money at a ridiculous rate and they are burning out their employees as well. Not kidding, I am seeing this a lot.

 Are You Doing These Internet Marketing Best Practices?

1) Blogging properly for SEO and using Videos with target keywords. How do we do that? Well you can look at Google Adwords to see what is most searched for. Or you can think like a customer, what terms would they use if they were describing their problem or looking for a solution like yours? 

Now use those key terms to tag your media in about 400 articles and or videos that tell them how your solutions solve their problem. Search engine spiders will then crawl your website and rank you at the top for those keywords so google will pull up your website first when prospects are actually looking for your product or service.

2) Add an enticing educational offer to every blog article using a call-to-action button and landing page so you can educate prospects further about your solution and capture their contact info so you can email-lead nurture them. This is important because customers don't usually buy until the 5th time they have heard about something. Since they are often waiting on budget, you want to remain at the forefront of their budget planning amidst their many competing priorities.

3) Use marketing automation software to automatically send them more educational offers until they are ready to buy. That means you have to have about 10 to 20 educational offers depending on how long your sales cycle is. Sales Cycle length is often related to how expensive your products are, as you probably know. 

4) Follow up hot-marketing-qualified leads that download a lot of offers with a call from inside salespeople,  to offer more information like a demo and answer any open questions they may have. 

5) Don't wait for every prospect to find you, get out there on social media and buy a good email marketing list and let the right people know the pain points you solve via brightly-colored-educational offers and clever relevant text to draw them in. 

6) Get to the point quickly via video or blog articles about which pain points you can solve for your other customers. Don't make it an inside joke, believe it or not prospects don't want to dig for the nugget that is your solution. 

Go ahead, tell them directly how you can make their life and / or job easier and more profitable. I'm not saying don't be creative, but there is creative, and then there's not selling anything because people don't know what you sell.

7) The really beautiful thing about internet marketing is you can measure results and actually prove what is working and what isn’t. Using closed-loop marketing analytics, you can see which programs drive leads that close in business. With Social Media you can see how many shares, tweets, likes and leads you download from a given campaign. No more generating press releases and hoping for the best, you can measure what your customers like and give them more of the same. 

Give me a call so I can quickly get you on track with any of these steps that may not be working perfectly in your Lead Generation Machine. 

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